The Ever New Poet of Kashmir
The garden was silent.
An old woman
dressed in a scarlet robe,
gold earrings wearing down
her ears, she sat on a green mound.
She was quiet, like a picture.
One daughter-in-law brought
peach blossom tea, the other
came out to see to miles of rice
laid out to dry in the courtyard.
They looked at the poet's receding
figure, that was all that happened
on an afternoon when the clouds
were white, sky was blue.
Time flattened its wings
like a dead bird on the dirt road.
Autumn leaves of a weeping willow
fell like flowers on his path.
Some day this memory
will become one
with blind oblivion of a city
grated: turned to dust.
Ghosts will rise
from woeful Vyeth, in winter
when the moon is bright.
Only they will remember
us, the lost ones, banished followers
of Abhinavagupta, those
who accompanied the poet into
the darkest pine woods
in the hour
of his death he sang
to Shiva. One last song
and we remember.
[© Lalita Pandit, May 20, 1997].
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